Our Precious

We make our world better and easier with systems. Systems of work, of family, of analysis, of language, etc. Systems composed of many parts that work best if arranged just so. And which work much worse when just one part get out of place. Creating the great systems asymmetry: it is much easier to find specific ways to break things than to improve them.

So as humanity has slowly learned to find better words, stories, and norms to describe our values, hopes, fears, and ways to cooperate, we have consistently found it far easier to focus on negatives, instead of positives. We can describe bad events and their causes with great detail and clarity, and we can find and describe specific rules of behavior that, if followed, will limit what bad things happen. But we don’t even have clear words to describe what we want positively, much less clear processes or norms for how to get them. We mainly coordinate to achieve the good by avoiding the bad.

For example, most laws and social norms are about what you are not supposed to do, instead of what to do. And those things you should not do would typically result in small concrete harms. Like food poisoning, car crashes, product defects, lawsuits, reputations destroyed, etc.

Professional storytellers tell me that it is very hard to directly describe happy characters, or the processes by which they pursue happiness; most story energy comes instead from conflicts and bad outcomes. Most news reports are on the negative potential of events and trends, and most policy stories are about how we might coordinate to prevent specific bad things.

We usually agree that most of the specific things that break our many systems are bad, all else equal, but we can’t decide how to trade them off against one another without broader values, on what is good. And while given a concrete choice between bads we will each in fact choose, we usually can’t articulate why. In this context, it makes sense for economists to estimate social value by aggregating willingness to pay in concrete choices. And such aggregates seem sufficient for futarchy to function. But that still leaves the key question: what exactly do we value positively?

Positive stuff like fun, happiness, meaning, motivation, passion, authenticity, and love are not only vague and hard to define, but are also famously hard to directly pursue. It’s hard to make a party fun on purpose, or to fall in love on purpose. The best events of your lifetime, such as when you and someone else fell in love, may have involved talking, but not much talking about that process itself. Instead you both intuitively felt and reacted to the changing feelings and closeness of your context and partner. Explicit verbal analysis did little to help.

So let me warn you, and remind myself: there do at times appear in our lives precious people, moments, and things that we deeply and positively value. The point of apparently positive items like “liberty”, “safety”, “prosperity”, and “innovation” is mostly to help us hold bad things at bay, so that our systems can function to sometimes let us see and realize our few precious positive things. About which we understand so little.

I don’t know how to make better progress toward understanding and articulating our true deep positive values. But please let us keep looking and trying. Because if that might somehow help us to do substantially better at achieving and keeping them, it should be enormously, terribly valuable.